we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

Time spent with poets is never wasted.

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.